Meet the One Million Strong – Barbara B. From Oregon

Meet Barbara Barbara Baughman, caregiver Hillsboro, Oregon Barbara’s Story This is my husband Rodger, who was diagnosed in February 2008 with stage IV colorectal cancer. We were at our beach house when Rodger began experiencing major bleeding. He decided that he wanted to be back in Hillsboro, so we drove immediately home and then to the… Read More

COIN: No Benefit Found Adding Cetuximab to FOLFOX or CAPOX in First-Line CRC Treatment

Even in colorectal cancer patients with wild-type KRAS mutations, there was no increase in overall survival time or in the time it took before cancer progressed when Erbitux® (cetuximab) was added to FOLFOX or CAPOX chemotherapy. More tumors got smaller with Erbitux treatment, but there was an increase in both serious gastrointestinal toxicity and severe skin… Read More

Personalizing Personalized Medicine

On Monday, April 25th, Fight Colorectal Cancer held a free patient webinar that tackled the somewhat complex but fascinating topic of personalized medicine. Personalized medicine is what the cancer community calls treatments that are tailored to each patient’s genetic makeup. It is the future of cancer care and in some cases, it is already making a… Read More

Leading GI Cancer Researcher Updates Patients

Last night, Dr. Edith Mitchell of Thomas Jefferson University Kimmel Cancer Center in Philadelphia, PA, updated colorectal cancer patients on the latest research and treatment news in an online webinar. Dr. Mitchell highlighted the most important news for colon and rectal cancer patients to come from the 2011 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium held in San Francisco last… Read More

Does adding Erbitux to chemotherapy help people whose colorectal cancer has spread beyond the colon or rectum to distant body sites? The answer is yes, according to a pooled analysis of two large randomized clinical trials comparing chemotherapy alone to chemotherapy plus Erbitux® (cetuximab). However, benefits depend on whether or not patient tumors have mutations of… Read More

No Benefit Adding Cetuximab to Chemo for Stage III Colon Cancer

Adding Erbitux® (cetuximab) to standard chemotherapy for stage III colon cancer didn’t improve patient outcomes and added more side effects. All of the patients in the NO147 trial had cancer that had spread to their lymph nodes and had surgery before beginning chemotherapy. They had normal or wild-type KRAS genes in their tumors.They were randomly assigned… Read More